“You're in the South Now, Brother”: the Atlanta Hawks and Race, 1968–1970
“You’re in the South Now, Brother”: The Atlanta Hawks and Race, 1968–1970 BY THOMAS AIELLO mong the players trickling into Atlanta in the summer of A 1968 following the arrival of the first NBA team to the Deep South, the former St. Louis Hawks, was “Pogo” Joe Caldwell, one of the team’s stars. In 1968, the Hawks, a perennial league power, had been regular-season champion of the league’s Western Divi- sion. Caldwell was an all-star, a former standout at Arizona State who played on the 1964 United States gold-medal-winning Olym- pic team. Caldwell, his wife, daughters, and sister arrived at the Holiday Inn in Atlanta, only to be greeted by a car full of whites who screamed “Hey, niggers!” before driving away. “Well,” his sis- ter told him, “you’re in the South now, brother.”1 Professional sports had already arrived in Atlanta and the Deep South when the Hawks began playing at Georgia Tech’s Alexander Memorial Coliseum in October 1968. The move of the Milwaukee Braves to Atlanta, the impact of their black star, Hank Aaron, and the country’s poetic and fraught historical re- lationship with baseball and its role in race relations are gener- ally interpreted as paving the way for first the National Football League and then the NBA. This interpretation is instructive 1Joe Caldwell, Banned from Basketball: The Long Strange Trip of “Pogo” Joe Caldwell (Tempe, AZ, 2003). Caldwell’s book is self-published and not paginated. This account, when citing Caldwell’s book, will note the chapters from which the material is taken.
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